Recovered Histories
Recovered Histories
“What is uncovered here is light and love, deep and wide enough to embrace all our stories.” Rita Hindocha, from the foreword; arrived as a refugee from Uganda, 1972
The continuing root system
The work comes from a longer practice concerned with inherited memory, family rupture, faith, sacred fragments, migration, archive, print, object and light.
A public and civic form
Here those private and ancestral concerns opened outwards into shared testimony, public history and collaborative remembrance with people whose lives had also been shaped by displacement.
Other directions from the same stem
The later work does not simply descend from this project. It returns to the same stem and grows differently, through saints, maps, votive objects, Istanbul, illuminated surfaces and the wider question of what can be carried forward.
I have been working on the theme of layers for a while: stories unfolding over archetypal faces and in the form of annotated maps. Most often we see only the surface, when beneath there is a wealth of knowledge and information. The works have been informed by my own experiences, from the resettlement of my parents on the basis of religion, to my own, as an adolescent migrant, and by the privilege of working with others whose lives have been shaped by the pain of displacement.
The banner works are on material that alludes to the hessian sacks that contained the crop of raisins my grandparents harvested every year, a kind of agriculture brought to Crete from Asia Minor with the refugees. The hands that appear, sometimes almost hidden, carry the dual meaning of giving and of taking, of offering help and of committing violence. In the back-lit works, the good and the bad memories flicker through the top layer. Light and curiosity reveal new details, the way that research does.
And there are some parts that will only appear when the audience leaves. What could not easily be seen in the light will appear for a while in the darkened gallery space. Memories, like the phosphoric ink used in these layers, will appear fleetingly, like ghosts in the night.
I will always return to the ruins. This is my place of worship. I enter in silence. I move slowly to the epicentre, where the mystery takes place. There, I am in communion with my sadness but also hope. I listen to the sermon as the buildings collapse. I bow my head as the shards of memories are hurled towards me. I receive the host as images are rekindled. Blinding light surrounds me as candle flames sway in their stands. I exit. Memory as a catastrophic personal event, superimposed over patterns from Iran and Syria.
In the geometry of faces we attempt to deduce origin. The verticality of the forehead and the setting of the eye are purposefully manipulated to create an ‘Asiatic’ profile. Layers of patterns symbolise historical epochs and habitats; the lines emulate ancient travel routes. I was intrigued by the crossing of the Mediterranean by people from the Middle East, historically to civilise, presently in desperate need for safety.
The stacked images depict layers of successive influences, cross-fertilisation and changes in identity over time. Quintus of Smyrna, Greek denoting his assumed language and identity, although in terms of DNA he would be a beautiful amalgam composed of many ethnic elements. The only certainty about him was his spoken language.
He put every last bit of happiness he had into his pockets and ran. The wind blew past his skin and he started to forget. Sweat ran over his eyes and mouth, washing over him, a cleansing, and a baptism, this time with no religion to confine him. There in the distance, obscured by the sunset, framed by the snow-capped mountains, he could see the border. He did not know what lay beyond, but whatever it was, he would not complain.
The life that you know of, the life that you have understood me to have had, is not as it seems. One day when you begin to look for answers, you will find my writings: small carefully traced letters on lined paper, tiny words of a past you could not see. Hold on to my life, let it be a blessing to you, and see through my eyes. Don’t forget: you were forged out of adversity, and this, my son, is but a brief glimpse of something greater.
We come from many places, guided by a compass pointing in several directions. No straight lines, no priority lanes, no signposts. So many stories, but I cannot begin to ask, for fear of knowing. We gather around a task and we make something beautiful. We look at each other and we know that we are all still travelling, me among them. The paper and the inks soak each other up, like us, each one looking for the other.
Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani as a young child with her paternal grandfather, a devout Muslim in Isfahan. Of all the images she shared, this one stood out, imbued with a sense of continuity, of records written, pictorial or recounted, in which our personal and national histories are preserved. The word ‘notebook’, daftar in Persian, travels through Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, Aramaic, Ancient Greek, Hebrew, Kazakh, Mongolian, Tibetan and a dozen more tongues. Words and ideas, like human DNA, are shared and travel around our small planet.
Constructed from patterns that draw on Bishop Guli’s upbringing in Iran before the 1979 revolution, the Christian faith central to her life, and family photographs. Beneath the visual elements sits writing: extracts from her father’s autobiography and verses from Isaiah, Psalms, Corinthians, Romans and Revelation, adding depth and tonal range. The cycle of pain, hope, resurrection and transcendence reflects the stages of recovery: to succumb, survive, recover, and thrive.
Ah yavrum, my baby, my beloved; she saves the sweet words for the children. She is angry with him: why did you not save us? He stares down at his worn hands. They would work another soil, another land, same job, same sweat, but the grapes would never be as sweet for him. Acı üzüm, bitter grapes. The new homeland was beautiful, but his eyes were fixed on the past. New languages have taken over our dreams now, but we remember the sweetness of the old ones, when we hurt, when we pray, when we love, when we hope.
They come unexpectedly, these few forgotten photographs, nameless and half-forgotten, stuck in this library or that archive, slowly turning to dust. Two faces peer from one of a handful of photographs in some archive far away: a twelve-year-old and an eight-year-old huddle together at the back of the group. I place it in 1921, a year before they were deported alongside the other two million souls. Whether these two boys are my father and uncle or not, I am forever trying to find the answers in the piles of photographs that gather like driftwood in a hundred distant corners.
I finally found them in the local authority archives, inside a register of all the migrants from Asia Minor deported to Greece, the family surname wrongly recorded. This was not only a record of my mother, but of the wider displaced family line: the altered names, the gaps and the fragments that still shaped us. My yiayia was the last in the family with a connection to all the mystery of our culture: the stories, the sayings, the secret spells and recipes. She was my witch from Izmir, complicated and powerful, straight talking and no-nonsense. What remained between us, even as she slipped away in hospital still holding my hand, was a love that only now is coming into full focus.
A multi-layered image made up from over forty separate components, some hand drawn, others screen printed or digitally enhanced family photographs from five families who experienced displacement: Bishop Guli’s, Arvind Bhatt’s, the Georgiadi and Sfougaras families, and Minaz Samnai’s parents. A composite human story of change and adaptation, of survival, growth, contribution and coexistence. It is the story of our lives, of Leicester, of the eternal hope for a better tomorrow.
A map of my home town, a narrative history of the civilisations that existed side by side on Crete, combined with a self-portrait in which the beard is made up of tiny migrating figures, and leaves that contain images of ancestors. ‘Yiorgos’ is the Greek version of my name, seldom used in the UK, exclusively used when I return to Greece. The title and the imagery comment on the complexity and tension of defining an individual in terms of their place of origin, alone.
Made with others
Poems by Michele Benn, Malka Al-Haddad and Paul Conneally. Film by Kate Drucquer. Lighting design by Paul Rudman. Embellishment by Linda Harding. Prints made with the ROOTS volunteers: Bharti, Cloud Chunga, Manoj and Nisha Patel, Minaz Samnai and Maya, at Leicester Print Workshop. Family archives generously shared by Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani and Arvind Bhatt. Work of this kind must be treated with the utmost respect: the published outcomes and narratives are only those the contributors explicitly agreed to share.
To recover the past is not an act of nostalgia or morbid curiosity. It is an important function of a time-limited life: to learn from those that preceded us and to hand down important information. In recovering those individual and collective narratives we are able to feel, acknowledge, learn and forgive.
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